The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times

Description

A. C. Grayling's lucid and stimulating books, based on the idea that philosophy should engage with the world and make itself useful, are immensely popular. The Challenge of Things joins earlier collections like The Reason of Things and Thinking of Answers, but this time to collect Grayling's recent writings on the world in a time of war and conflict. In describing and exposing the dark side of things, he also explores ways out of the habits and prejudices of mind that would otherwise trap us forever in the deadly impasses of conflicts of all kinds. Whether he is writing about the First World War and its legacy, free speech, the advantages of an atheist prime minister or the role of science in the arts, his essays are always enlightening, enlivening and hopeful.

A. C. Grayling is Master of the New College of the Humanities, UK. He has written and edited numerous works of philosophy and is the author of biographies of Descartes and William Hazlitt. He believes that philosophy should take an active, useful role in society. He has been a regular contributor to The Times, Financial Times, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Economist, Literary Review, New Statesman and Prospect, and is a frequent and popular contributor to radio and television programmes, including Newsnight, Today, In Our Time, Start the Week and CNN news. He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum at Davos, and advises on many committees ranging from Drug Testing at Work to human rights groups.

Grayling is particularly good at illuminating the knottiness of moral discourse * Sunday Times * Grayling writes with clarity, elegance and the occasional aphoristic twist, conscious of standing in that long essayistic tradition that runs from Montaigne and Bacon to Emerson and Thoreau * Daily Telegraph * If there is any such person in Britain as The Thinking Man, it is A. C. Grayling * The Times * The range of topics he covers is impressively broad, taking in subjects as diverse as the ethics of drone warfare, the nature of the mind and the meaning of happiness ... "Informed and considered" also nicely describes his urbane and eminently reasonable intellectual style ... At his best, Grayling is a tough-minded proponent of the kind of enlightened rationalism expounded by several of the public intellectuals with whom he declares an affinity here: Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, to name only three. But he's more historically-minded than Russell, less dogmatic than Dawkins and less in thrall to the charms of his own fluency than Hitchens * Prospect *